Renowned author SP Chari has filed a lawsuit against director SS Rajamouli and the Magadheera team for copyrights violation.
According to SP Chari, the film is a direct lift from his novel Chanderi which was about Hardoul and Indumati who lived in the Madhya Pradesh region.
The lovers committed suicide after Hardoul’s brother opposed their relationship and they were reborn 400 years later in the Andhra region to be reunited in their next birth.
Filing a case at the Hyderabad Civil Court, SP Chari said that the makers of the film should have given him due credit or the law would take its own course to render him justice.
The author alleged that director SS Rajamouli had just changed the names of the characters and had made some changes to the villain character.
Ram Charan had played the dual roles in Magadheera, which is based on re-incarnation theme. The film, released in 2009, was penned by KV Vijayendra Prasad and directed by SS Rajamouli.
It had Kajal Aggarwal playing the female lead with Dev Gill and Srihari included in the star cast. It is unclear why SP Chari chose to bring up this issue after eight long years.
Magadheera, which is Ram Charan’s second film after his debut with Chirutha, went on to become a huge hit.
Made on a budget of Rs 350 crore, the film was declared a blockbuster.
Apart from the commercial success, it also went on to win prestigious awards including the National Award for Best Choreography and Best Special Effects at the 57th National Film Awards; six Filmfare Awards, nine Nandi Awards and ten CineMAA Awards.
Produced by Allu Aravind and B V S N Prasad under the banner Geetha Arts, the film released in the year 2009.
With SP Chari filing a lawsuit, neither SS Rajamouli nor the makers of Magadheera were available for comments on this.
This development came on the same day when the producers of Magadheera announced that they are withdrawing a plagiarism case against the makers of Bollywood film Raabta.
The producers of Magadheera claimed that an iconic fight sequence and the backstory of the villain from the film had been copied.
"We presented our case to the honourable court as to how the films are not similar. In the morning, the makers of Magadheera withdrew their case," Dinesh Vijan, director of Raabta, told IANS.
Digital Native and IANS inputs